‘She said he calls her “Doll”,’ said Peder, breaking the silence.
‘Doll?’ echoed Alex.
Any bereavement is hard to bear.
But the grief of losing a child is not just heavy: it is as dark as night.
Fredrika tried to hold that thought in her mind as she got out of the car outside Sara Sebastiansson’s flat. Once she had had the phone call from Umeå, there was no reason to delay, so she had come straight round. She wondered if she was overstepping the mark by coming to see her on a Saturday evening, and found the answer to be an emphatic no. No, given the circumstances it wasn’t wrong. Not in the slightest.
Fredrika tried to keep her anger in check. She tried to understand, and above all she tried to convince herself there was a reason why Sara had behaved as she had done.
But she could feel the frustration pounding away inside her. A piece of the puzzle had been missing all this time, and Sara had been coolly sitting there with it in her hand. She had not just obstructed the investigation of her own daughter’s death; she had also obstructed progress in the baby Natalie case.
Fredrika wished instinctively and with all her heart that Sara would be alone in the flat when she rang the doorbell. Otherwise she would have to ask the parents to leave.
Sara opened the door at Fredrika’s second ring. She looked pale and haggard, with such dark rings under her bloodshot eyes that all Fredrika’s anger and frustration melted away. Reality landed right in front of her: this was a woman who had just experienced her worst nightmare in real life. Criticism had very little place here.
‘I’m sorry to turn up unannounced,’ Fredrika said in a low but steady voice, ‘but I need to talk to you.’
Sara stepped back from the door to let Fredrika in, and showed her through to the living room. It seemed to be serving as an extra bedroom; there were mattresses on the floor. Presumably her parents hadn’t gone home yet, though to Fredrika’s relief they weren’t anywhere to be seen.
‘Are you on your own?’ asked Fredrika.
Sara nodded.
‘Mum and Dad are out doing some food shopping,’ she said in a thin voice. ‘They’ll be back soon.’
Fredrika unobtrusively took out her notepad.
‘Have you found him?’ The words burst out of Sara.
‘You mean . . .’ Fredrika began, rather confused.
‘I mean Gabriel,’ replied Sara, and when Fredrika met her gaze she felt cold all over.
Sara’s eyes were blazing with pure, unadulterated hatred.
‘No,’ said Fredrika, ‘we haven’t found him. But we’ve issued a nationwide alert and arrested him in his absence.’
She swallowed and paused.
‘But we no longer suspect him of Lilian’s abduction and murder. In purely practical terms, he can’t possibly have done it.’
Sara gave Fredrika a long look.
‘I don’t think he murdered our daughter either,’ she said. ‘But now I know he had his computer full of disgusting child porn, I can’t wait for you to find him and lock him up for all the time he’s damn well got left to him.’
Fredrika did not even consider getting into a discussion of the sort of sentence that might be waiting for Gabriel Sebastiansson when they found him, if they ever did. She kept it all inside her, and tried to say something comforting instead:
‘There’s nothing to indicate he abused Lilian.’
Sara stared straight ahead through empty eyes, and said on a rising note:
‘So I was told. But that’s no guarantee he didn’t touch her, the total arsehole.’
She shrieked the last words so loud that Fredrika began to wonder if it had been such a good idea to come alone and unannounced, but she held her apprehension in check. Her business with Sara was vital to the investigation.
‘Sara,’ she said resolutely, ‘we need to talk about Umeå.’
Sara wiped away a few tears that had found their way down her cheeks.
‘I’ve already told you about Umeå,’ she said.
‘But I wonder if you’ve any idea why Lilian ended up outside the hospital,’ Fredrika said.
‘I haven’t got a clue,’ Sara said, but she avoided looking at Fredrika.
‘We, the police, think she was left there for a special reason,’ Fredrika went on implacably. ‘We think you might have some connection to the place, which the murderer knew about, and that was why he chose that precise location.’
Sara stared uncomprehendingly at Fredrika.
‘Is there something you haven’t told us?’ asked Fredrika. ‘Something you thought wasn’t important, that couldn’t possibly have any bearing on the case, so you didn’t need to tell us about it? Something private that you’d rather not talk about?’
Sara dropped her eyes and shook her head. Fredrika suppressed a sigh.
‘Sara, we know you have a patient file at Umeå University Hospital,’ she said firmly, ‘and we’re convinced there’s a link between your visit and the fact that Lilian was left there.’
‘I had an abortion,’ whispered Sara, after a long hesitation.
Fredrika did not take her eyes off Sara’s face. That was what she had suspected, but she had needed confirmation.
‘I got pregnant about the time I broke up with my boyfriend that spring, and of course I couldn’t tell them about it at home. So I decided to have it done when I was up in Umeå on the course. It wasn’t very difficult to arrange. I told the course tutor I had to have a day off to meet someone I knew, and then I went to the hospital instead.’
What was the loneliest thing imaginable? Going through a covert abortion had to be high on the list. And more importantly, was that why Sara was now being punished so cruelly?
‘I’m really sorry we have to drag up this old business,’ said Fredrika, ‘but we have to know for the sake of the investigation.’
Sara nodded and shed silent tears.
‘Did anyone – anyone at all – know what you had done in Umeå?’
Sara shook her head hard.
‘Nobody knew,’ she sobbed. ‘Not even Maria who came on the course with me. I didn’t tell a single person. I’ve never spoken about it until now.’
Fredrika’s body registered pain. Sara’s living room felt as if it was closing in around her.
‘And that was why you made sure you stayed on in Umeå longer than Maria?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I couldn’t very well have it done while Maria was still there,’ said Sara, suddenly very tired.
Then she pulled herself together.
‘It would be extremely unfortunate if my parents found out about this,’ she said, her voice shaking.
‘I can assure you that we won’t be letting the information go any further,’ Fredrika swiftly assured her, and very much hoped she wasn’t lying.
Then she asked again:
‘You’re sure you didn’t tell anyone? Not even your boyfriend? Wasn’t there anyone who knew or could have suspected something?’
Sara shook her head.
‘I didn’t tell a soul,’ she said doggedly. ‘Not a soul.’
But somebody knew, thought Fredrika. Some evil person knew.
And then, without thinking what she was doing, she leant forward and laid a warm hand on Sara’s shoulder. Almost like the pastoral carer she had said she didn’t want to be.
Ellen Lind didn’t feel guilty about going home earlier than the others in the team. Her role wasn’t the most vital, after all.
All the time she was growing up, Ellen had been the classic overshadowed child. She lived permanently in the shadow of her older and more successful siblings. She also lived in the shadow of her attractive, successful parents. She was very aware of being the unplanned afterthought, while the other children had been very much wanted. Ellen wasn’t even a family name, unlike those her two elder brothers and sister had been given.
Her sense of exclusion intensified and became permanently ingrained. Ellen was different. She even looked different. She was differently proportion
ed, with blunter facial features. Her sister and brothers were tall, good-looking, and self-assured from an early age. But not Ellen.
Ellen, however, had put all that behind her long ago. Now that she was a grown-up woman with a family of her own, she viewed her parents and siblings as little more than distant relations.
Past experience meant Ellen felt fairly resigned to the sense of exclusion she experienced at work. She was used to being the outsider, used to not fitting in. She and Fredrika had had a few discreet chats about it – everything about Fredrika was discreet – when Fredrika first joined the team, but they hadn’t exactly become close friends. Ellen thought that was rather a shame, because she was sure she and Fredrika would have made ideal friends.
But neither Fredrika nor work was uppermost in her mind as she went home that Saturday night. She was thinking about Carl, and about her children. Most of all, she was thinking about Carl.
She was concerned that he hadn’t replied to her text, not yesterday and not today either. Nor had he answered when she rang him. She didn’t even get through to his voicemail, just to a robotic monotone telling her syllable by syllable that ‘this subscriber is currently unavailable. Please try again later.’
It was as if he had gone to ground.
Ellen tried not to worry. It had all gone swimmingly last time they met. She knew she’d been over-sensitive about relationships since her marriage fell apart. She easily got a touch paranoid, and there was undoubtedly no less desirable quality you could possess in the marriage market. She felt her chest tightening and a sort of pressure building there. A few deep breaths made her feel better. But a bit later she found her stomach aching instead.
She knew it was idiotic, of course. There would be a perfectly natural explanation for Carl’s silence. She couldn’t expect him to be permanently available for her.
Ellen tried to laugh at herself.
She had really got it badly. She was seriously in love, for the first time ever.
The pathologist who carried out the autopsy on baby Natalie finally managed to get hold of Alex. She told him in brief that the procedure appeared identical to the way Lilian Sebastiansson had been killed. Insulin had been injected into her fontanelle. No fingerprints and no traces of another person’s DNA had been found on the body.
There had been no trace either, however, of the talc product found on Lilian.
‘Which is rather strange,’ the pathologist remarked. ‘It means the murderer decided he didn’t need to wear gloves for this murder.’
‘There’s nothing strange about it,’ Alex said bluntly. ‘Our man doesn’t have to worry about leaving fingerprints; only the woman, and his previous female accomplice, needed gloves. And the woman didn’t handle the second child.’
‘Why doesn’t he need gloves?’ asked the pathologist in surprise.
‘He burned his own hands to make sure he wouldn’t leave fingerprints.’
‘Incredible,’ the pathologist whispered, mainly to herself.
Alex asked whether she could tell him anything else.
There was silence while she thought.
‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘No, nothing at all. Well yes, actually.’
Alex waited.
‘We found no traces of sedative in the baby like those we found in Lilian.’
Alex pondered this.
‘The baby was asleep when she was snatched from her pram,’ he mused aloud. ‘The murderer probably didn’t feel the need to sedate her.’
‘Of course,’ said the pathologist. ‘Of course.’
Then she added:
‘There’s nothing more I can tell you about the baby. No violence was done to her other than the lethal injection, and I found no bruising on her body, new or old.’
‘Old?’ queried Alex, frowning.
He could sense the pathologist blushing at the other end of the line as she answered:
‘There are so many sick parents. It was just as well to check . . .’
Alex gave a sad smile.
‘Yes, you’re quite right.’
It had initially surprised Alex to find how often the executioner was to be found in the victim’s immediate vicinity. It had taken him years to understand how it was even possible. He could comprehend how someone might lose their head in the heat of the moment and hit out at another person. But the step from there to the cold-blooded killing of another human being, often fully conscious of what you were doing, was too big for him to take. What was more, people seemed capable of killing each other for the most bizarre reasons.
‘It’s a mad world,’ Alex whispered to his wife one evening when they were newly married and about to go to sleep.
She had chosen that moment to tell him they were expecting their first baby. Her timing in breaking the news had done nothing to dispel his conception of the world: it was mad.
But however hard Alex struggled to make the Lilian case fit the mould of all the other missing children cases he had dealt with in his career, however hard he wished it would end in some way he would later find hard to call to mind, he knew that the case of the abduction and death of Lilian Sebastiansson was quite unique, and that he would never forget it.
He peered at the clock. How long were they going to carry on? Was it really worth their while to work all night? How would everyone feel tomorrow if they did? The team had got to be able to stay the course.
The pathologist gave a little cough. The sound interrupted Alex’s thoughts and made him feel foolish.
‘Excuse me,’ he hastened to say, ‘but I didn’t quite hear that last bit.’
The pathologist seemed to be hesitating.
‘The fact that he injects the toxic substance into the child’s head,’ she started slowly.
‘Yes?’
Further hesitation.
‘I don’t know, maybe I’m completely wrong and it’s got nothing to do with the case, but . . . in some countries that’s an entirely legal method of carrying out a late abortion.’
‘Sorry?’ said Alex, raising his eyebrows.
‘Yes, it’s true,’ said the pathologist, rather more sure of herself now.
When Alex said nothing, she continued.
‘It was practised in a number of countries where very late abortions were allowed. It was really more of a delivery than an abortion. When the baby’s head appeared, the lethal substance was injected straight into the skull, so the child was by definition stillborn when it came out.’
‘Good God,’ said Alex.
‘Well that’s how it was,’ the pathologist said in conclusion. ‘But as I say, it may not be relevant to this case at all.’
The thoughts went chasing round inside Alex’s head.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he told the pathologist. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’
Alex returned with renewed energy to the material spread out in front of him.
The atmosphere in the Den had been magical when the American psychologist was talking. It was actually a long time since Alex had encountered someone who spoke that much sense. He had practically laid out the whole structure for the investigation from that point on.
Alex grabbed the report he had just had from the squad that had searched Jelena Scortz’s flat. It had been hard work, very hard work, extracting a search warrant from the examining magistrate. Jelena was considered to have admitted far too little to confirm that she was implicated in Lilian’s murder. It was only when Alex made the point that regardless of the degree to which they could prove she was an accessory to murder, she had at the very least admitted that the main suspect had stayed in the flat. That was enough to justify a search warrant.
But just as the psychologist had predicted, the search of the flat yielded nothing to help them identify the killer. They naturally found huge numbers of fingerprints in the flat. And when they were checked against the National Police Board’s fingerprint register, they nearly all turned out to belong to Jelena herself. Her fingerprints were stored in the system because she h
ad been arrested and charged with theft and receiving stolen goods some years before.
None of the other fingerprints had matched anything in the register. And the perpetrator himself left no fingerprints at all, of course.
Alex felt ill looking at the photos taken in the bedroom where Jelena had been left after the assault. Blood on the sheets, blood on the walls, blood on the floor.
The search team had not found a single object that looked as if it could belong to a man. There was only one toothbrush in the bathroom, and that had been taken for analysis. Alex was absolutely certain they would find no one’s DNA on it but Jelena’s. They found no men’s clothes, either.
There were in fact only two items of potential interest that the police had brought from the flat. One was some individual strands of hair, found on the bathroom floor. With luck they might prove to be Lilian Sebastiansson’s, and then there would be no need to worry any more about linking Jelena to Lilian’s murder. The other was a pair of dark Ecco shoes, size 46. They had been standing neatly in the hall.
Alex was entirely nonplussed. How could anyone as strategic and intelligent as the murderer clearly was make such a blunder?
Then he realized there could only be one answer, and his pulse rate accelerated to an almost dangerous level.
It was obvious – obvious – that the murderer must have returned to the flat after the assault on Jelena. Returned and discovered her gone. It must have been quite easy for him to work out that the police would link Jelena to the crime sooner or later, especially if he had seen the appeal for information about her in the national press.
‘Shit, shit, shit!’ shouted Alex, thumping his fist on the desk.
He stared at the picture of the Ecco shoes, which seemed to be jeering at him. The sheer cheek of it made him feel weak at the knees.
He knew we’d be able to identify Jelena sooner or later, and that would eventually lead us to the flat as well, Alex thought. So he left the goddamn shoes as a greeting.
It was almost half past seven and Fredrika Bergman was wondering whether to drop in on Magdalena Gregersdotter before nightfall or to leave it for the next day. She decided to go back to the office and talk it over with Alex before making up her mind.
Unwanted Page 31
